14 DAY TRIAL // A multitude of diabetes patients arrive at their doctors' offices hoping to get pills that could alleviate their condition. When they go home however, they carry on with the same lifestyle choices that triggered the condition in the first place. Scientists say that changing lifestyles is the best drug.
An important segment of people who develop this condition do so because of the choices they made throughout their lives, regarding what to eat, how much to exercise, how to take care of themselves and so on. Changing this naturally has the most influence on the disease.
That is not to say that drugs are not effective at providing relief from diabetes symptoms. The problem is that this is all they do, hide a problem rather than eliminating its causes, LiveScience reports.
This is why patients who continue on with their former lifestyle do not experience any improvements regardless of how many drugs their doctors prescribe them. This hints at the fact that more emphasis should be placed on prevention and lifestyle changes than medication.
In a paper published in last week's issue of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, experts say that a healthy diet and regular exercises are the best way of preventing diabetes, and also of addressing it as the condition sets in.
In the new work, scientists set off from demonstrating that metformin – a drug the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved more than 15 years ago – is still more efficient at treating diabetes than newer, more advanced drugs.
But diets and exercises beat metformin to the title of best treatment course against diabetes, experts say.
According to a scientific paper published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 2002, lifestyle changes applied in a study group during the national, multi-year Diabetes Prevention Program were twice more effective at treating diabetes than metformin.
The new research basically validates the NEJM investigation. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Medicine compared metformin to five new classes of drugs approved by the FDA for treating diabetes.
Since metformin was proven to be better than all of them, and the lifestyle changes were proven to be 200 percent more efficient than metformin, it's more than reasonable to deduce that eating healthy and working out is better than any drug.